The future of being trans on the internet
The future for trans life in America is as uncertain as it’s ever been. Bans on sports participation, healthcare, and bathrooms are popping up all over the country. Misinformation about surgeries and hormones are the far right’s favorite straw man. The same internet that allowed scared and confused young people to connect with others like them and find life-saving information about gender transition is the one that allows bad actors to dox and harass trans people. Platforms are engaging in more and more censorship of trans speech and information about gender affirming care.
Trans people take the path of most risk when they choose to live their truest lives. The internet as a democratizing force has empowered trans people to find their own information and create their own worlds, which poses an existential threat to the ruling order of binary sex definitions. The Verge understands the importance of speaking truth to power in this moment and made space for trans writers to express what online life is like for trans people right now in “The future of being trans on the internet.” The design brief was six stories with a central hub, including a design language that expresses the uncertainty that people with this vulnerable identity experience.
Cath Virginia art directed and designed this package to avoid imagery that felt either too cliche or too predictive of what the future holds, seeking to exclude both doom and foreboding as well as naive optimism, and to instead create a world of ambiguity, possibility, and unpredictability that reflects the collective anxiety felt by so many. The looping background animation, designed by Taehee Yoonseul, is an ambient reminder to the viewer not only of the nebulousness the future holds, but also of the indefinability of trans identity. Transgender Grotesk, an elegant extended font licensed to us by type designer Sasha Cherepanov, provides a sophisticated architecture to the fluidity of the design, by emphasizing the organic layout by contrast.
The shape of the rounded octagon becomes the unifying motif throughout the package, providing areas of emphasis and rest for the eye at some times, while becoming a portal through which to view the background at others. The cut-out cursor effect on desktop adds a flare of drama, revealing the inverted state of the headline text to harken back to a theme of duality: the future for trans people holds both good and bad, safety and danger, some unknowns and some certainties. In the same way, trans identity itself is an inversion of expectation and an embrace of the unknown, turning the predictable into the unforeseen.